Designing the New Information
Services
by Philip E. Agre
Everybody
knows that information technology will change the world, but nobody
knows how. Basic changes in technology have created a vast new design
space, including both new ideas made conceivable by the technology and
old ideas made practicable by the technology's widespread adoption.
Technological change is often an occasion for institutional change,
and interest groups are announcing that exponential improvements in
information technology make their own institutional change agendas both
possible and inevitable. In the case of higher education, for example,
database vendors such as Oracle imagine the university being rebuilt
online around large multimedia courseware servers. Others imagine a
market in finely divided educational services, such that students purchase
each course or each lesson separately. Such agendas can become self-fulfilling
to a certain extent if they become inscribed in the basic categories
of software architecture and public policy. Before this happens, before
the possibilities of technology are foreclosed by the limits of imagination,
we need to discuss the full range of technological and institutional
options that are actually available at this seemingly pivotal time.
How do technology
and institutions interact? One story that used to dominate much of the
world, but that has since fallen out of fashion, identifies information
technology with rationalization. Indeed, in its original definition,1
the phrase information technology referred specifically to the
use of computers to replace human judgment by rational decision-making
in organizations. On one level, this story extended the practices of
industrial automation from the factory floor to the manager's office;
on another level, it was part of a centralized command-and-control ideology
that was just as deeply identified with capitalism as it has come to
be with socialism.
Strange as it would
have seemed in the 1960s, information technology has lost its close
cultural association with rationality. In part, this change has been
driven by actual organizational experience. Businesses that have tried
to organize their computer systems around a single consistent information
architecture have largely failed. In business schools, this ill-conceived
attempt to create a universal language has been replaced by a healthy
respect for the difficulty of reconciling the vocabularies and practices
of different business disciplines such as marketing, manufacturing,
and finance.2 This kind of epistemological pluralism is found on both
the left and the right. Feminists such as Sandra Harding emphasize the
ways in which knowledge is embedded in cultural worldviews and ways
of life, and classical libertarian economists such as Friedrich Hayek
argue that a centrally organized social order could never take into
account the detailed knowledge that individuals have of their local
environments.3
As a result, a
new story about information technology and institutional change has
taken hold, one that embraces the opposite extreme of decentralized
self-organization. Central to this story is the concept of disintermediation,
which courtesy of the miracle of Latin morphology is readily understood
as the obsolescence of all institutions that play a mediating role between
buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, students and knowledge, citizens
and laws. The new institutional order is imagined to be perfectly fluid,
so that anybody can be connected to anybody or anything at any time
and to anybody else or anything else at any other time. It is order
without centralized direction and with a perfect devolution of all decision-making
power from hierarchies to peripheries.
The desirability
of this story rests largely on its antipathy to institutions, which
it would dissolve. Institutions are envisaged as encumbering and static,
selfishly imposing an artificial and outdated order on lives and relationships
that could otherwise be freely chosen. These mediating institutions
had existed to create a path from point A to point B, goes the story,
but now that information technology provides such paths by its very
workings, the institutions exist only to resist change and postpone
their own fall. This story depicts institutions in a certain way: constraining
and not enabling, conduits and not repositories of memory in their own
right. It is surely a story with significant elements of truth. And
yet our responsibility in imagining an evolved institutional order in
a new technological world is to ensure that other elements of truth
are heard as well and are incorporated into the common sense of our
times.
To evaluate these
stories and others, we must get beyond some simple oppositions. For
example, it is useless to favor or oppose technology. The point is not
that technology is as undeniable as gravity but rather that technology
is plastic: we can be certain that the most basic quantitative aspects
of information and communications technologies will continue to improve
for the foreseeable future, but nothing follows from this about the
qualitative organization of the technology that we will actually choose.
Information technology is singularly open to social shaping and creative
appropriation, and opposition to a particular story about information
technology does not imply opposition to technology as such.
We must also get
beyond particular disciplinary frames. Notwithstanding the emergence
of new cultural stories, the day-to-day language and practices of computer
science still embody a great deal of the control orientation that they
derived from the institutional environments of their birth. For example,
the main tradition of computer systems design is inherently hostile
to privacy, in its assumption that everyone and everything in sight
needs to be identified and in its inability to comprehend, much less
to adopt, the privacy-protection technologies that eliminate conventional
identifiers or render them difficult to reconstruct.4 Clearly the disciplinary
frame of computing can benefit from constructive interference from other
fields. The disciplinary frame of economics, powerful though it certainly
is as a way of looking at the world, interacts in complex ways with
technical and political perspectives, particularly in the fraught area
of the economics of information.5 The political perspectives, for their
part, supply important conceptualizations of the legitimacy and illegitimacy
of institutions while lacking some of the very detailed analytical powers
of technology and economics. Finally, since language is at the heart
of computer systems design and the human interactions that computers
mediate, linguistic and discourse-analytic perspectives will be required
as well, each with its own somewhat incommensurable way of framing the
issues that arise. The great promise of information studies is to provide
the disciplinary switchboard through which these fields and others can
come together as we try to imagine and manage new information technologies
as phenomena of human social life.
At the point of
intersection of these various disciplinary perspectives is the need
for a new integrated design practice, one that draws on a great diversity
of converging disciplines to design a new generation of information
services. Technologies and institutions can be, and should be, designed
together, and the distinctive opportunities and requirements of each
should be brought to bear on the other. No longer will it suffice to
imagine new gadgets without any conception of the relationships and
activities within which they will be used, and no longer can we assume
that the traditional and familiar institutional forms will remain well-suited
to the opportunities that new technologies provide. Something of the
necessary convergence of design disciplines can be seen in novel forms
of business organization that take advantage of computer networking
to increase spans of control and to flatten hierarchies, in the invasion
of the territory of ergonomically minded user interface design by graphic
designers, many of whom now call themselves "information designers"
and "interaction designers,"6 and in the emergence of a new generation
of information appliances whose basic conception is driven as much by
industrial design as by circuit design.7 But much more can be done to
bring these various design disciplines into productive dialogue and
stepwise synthesis; the design of the new information services is a
good place to start. Observe that the object of design is not the gadget
but the service. As such, the new design practice works outward from
the experience of generations of librarians and commercial information
providers who have designed information services for diverse audiences.
New technology can lead to either greater fragmentation or greater integration
of knowledge in this area, depending on who takes the initiative to
define it.
What would such
an integrated design practice be like? First, every design practice
presupposes a particular relationship to power. Architecture, for example,
presupposes a client who can cause buildings to be built. Computer systems
design is partially the design of the human activity of using the systems,
and as such it presupposes that somebody is able to persuade some people
to organize their activity differently. It is little wonder, then, that
computer systems design went through significant changes during the
transition from the military and business markets, where such persuasive
power exists in abundance, to the consumer market, where it does not.
The relation of design to power is particularly crucial in the context
of emerging information technologies, which are organized around compatibility
standards that arise in global markets. The U.S. government, for example,
is rapidly learning that it can no longer set standards, through its
own unilateral action, in an area such as information security and that
it must instead build multilateral political alliances while using export
controls in an attempt at least to prevent vendors from settling on
standards that it does not like. And what is true for the government
is particularly true for lone designers and firms: new designs will
be adopted only to the extent that they become standards, and they will
become standards only if they are compatible, both in timing and in
substance, with a remarkably complex environment of coevolving standards
and the public and private stakeholders whose interests they affect.
Some designers do have the good fortune to be allied with a firm, such
as Microsoft, that possesses unilateral leverage over a particular portion
of the standards environment. All others will need some worked-out sense
of their participation in a larger process, and the practicalities and
strategies of this participation will be indissociable from even the
smallest details of the design work.
Some concepts will
be indispensable to this new design practice. One fundamental concept
is that of network effects.8 In its narrowest use, a good in a market
exhibits network effects to the extent that its value to a consumer
depends on the number of other consumers who have it. The classic example
is telephone service, which becomes more valuable as more potential
callers subscribe. Information goods and services such as network protocols
and data formats generally exhibit network effects when they must be
compatible with the protocols and formats employed by other users. But
the concept of network effects can also be applied more broadly. Vast
and cumbersome though it is, the institutional system of the European
Union exhibits network effects whose power is visible in the number
of countries that are lining up to join. Organizational practices likewise
exhibit network effects when they facilitate the circulation of learning
and expertise from one site of practice to another. Network effects
favor compatibility over adaptation to local circumstances, and they
tend to create winners and losers. The diverse processes by which these
winners and losers are chosen will be of great concern to all well-informed
and self-interested participants. A designer whose products obtain a
critical mass of users will succeed, whereas a designer who comes to
market too early or too late, or who lacks persuasive power, or whose
competitors are better able to act in a coordinated way at many points
in a complex global market, is likely to fail.
These standards
dynamics lie on the boundary between economics and politics. In certain
aspects, they can be understood as rational actors' reflexively interconstraining
choices, whose outcomes can be modeled quantitatively using the tools
of game theory. But at the same time, they can be seen as points of
public debate: a standard succeeds in large measure by becoming a self-fulfilling
prophecy whose prophetic power rests largely on symbols and ideology
and rhetoric and history.9 Legal scholars have observed that standards
act as a kind of law and that the establishment of standards is therefore
in the deepest sense a political process through which a community comes
to govern itself.10 Each perspective is valid, and it is important to
maintain a sense of the tension between the two. Only then can we usefully
ask (1) under what conditions it is even possible to establish a standard,
(2) what kind of standard is likely to emerge, and (3) who is likely
to win and lose as a result.
In practice, network
effects usually occur in close conjunction with another economic phenomenon,
economies of scale. Economies of scale are found whenever a good can
be produced in quantity more cheaply through a substantial initial investment.
Information goods are famous for the economies of scale because virtually
all of the cost of producing them goes into the first copy.11 Economies
of scale often reward the establishment of standards, in that the same
information good can be circulated and used more widely. A standard
computer operating system, established through network effects, will
create economies of scale for applications vendors, and the resulting
variety and low prices of software will further reinforce the dominance
of the standard operating system, whereupon the same effects will probably
lead to standardized winners among the applications as well. Analogous
phenomena are found in the organizational realm: a firm that buys a
competitor and standardizes the practices of the combined firm will
enjoy amplified economies of scale in a wide range of information and
knowledge work, thus leading to layoffs in those areas and to a competitive
advantage, all other things being equal, over any remaining competitors.
Taken together,
these phenomena cast considerable light on the nature of computing as
a social practice. Technologists characterize computers narrowly in
terms of the outputs they provide when certain data are provided as
inputs. But the bigger story concerns the origins of those inputs and
the conditions under which the outputs are meaningful out in the world.
If a computer derives inputs from the four corners of the country, or
from all around the world, then its outputs will be meaningful only
if those data were defined and captured in a uniform way. This in turn
requires some institution to establish and regulate a uniform set of
practices across great distances and a potentially great diversity of
physical and cultural environments. These are, in a broad sense, the
infrastructural conditions of computing.12
With these concepts
in mind, we can evaluate the radically decentralized story about both
information technology and social order that I sketched at the outset.
The story turns out to be complicated, with centralization and decentralization
interacting in several ways. The establishment of standards, for example,
usually requires centralized coordination, whether by a government,
a large private firm, or a professional organization. The establishment
of the metric system, for example, required both the rationalizing ideology
of the French Revolution and the centralized state apparatus that the
Revolution had inherited from the ancien régime. Once a standard is
established, however, it will usually be self-perpetuating due to network
effects, which will create a continuing incentive for everyone to do
what everyone else is doing. The centrally established order will continue
to be felt whether the center continues to impose it or not. Economies
of scale, for their part, tend to produce industry concentration, which
is certainly a kind of centralization, but the same technologies that
create those economies also permit organizations to decentralize operational
decision-making by using standardized practices of measuring and monitoring
to retain centralized control.
These interactions
between centralization and decentralization create several dangers that
any well-thought-out design practice must avoid. First is the danger
of premature implementation. Many good ideas in the computer industry
fail because they require as prerequisites the establishment of standards,
or a critical mass of potential users, or a sufficiently widespread
infrastructure, or all three. Likewise a proposed design can fail when
it bundles several functionalities that are viable only as separate
standards, each establishing economies of scale by being incorporated
into a wide range of applications. An example might be Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI), which bundled a special-purpose networking protocol
instead of waiting for a general-purpose network, such as the Internet,
to become widely established.
A second danger
arises when an institution is incapable of creating the centralized
coordination that it needs to establish a new technical or process standard.
When this happens, the institution can remain stuck in an inefficient
diversity of practices, unable to interoperate, share learning, or establish
economies of scale. Decentralization is thus not an unambiguous good
and can cause serious backwardness.
A third danger
occurs when a standardization process must move so quickly that it does
not have time for democratic mechanisms, broad representation, and reflective
deliberation. This is an urgent matter for due-process-oriented standards
organizations that increasingly find themselves bypassed by private
standards-setting consortia, which are usually dominated by large vendors
even more than are the formal standards bodies.13 Democratic values
are also endangered by the very fact of standardization. Inasmuch as
the potential damage from a security breach is multiplied on a network
of standardized systems, the need for military and police intervention
to secure those systems against malicious disruption is greatly expanded.
A final danger
derives from the dynamics of network effects themselves. Under ideal
economic conditions, the standards that emerge from competition among
different networks will closely reflect consumers' interests as expressed
in their market choices. But ideal economic conditions are difficult
to obtain in extremely complex and fast-moving high-technology markets,
and as a result, network effects create a significant bias in favor
of rapid time-to-market and against product quality. The result can
be the nearly irreversible entrenchment of a low-quality standard --
a phenomenon familiar in the personal computer software market.
These observations
relate to the nature of institutions and the institutional dimensions
of design. The word institution is often loosely used to mean
"organization," for example in the ways that an organization manages
to perpetuate itself and its traditions even as particular individuals
come and go. But the mechanisms I have been describing lead to the establishment
of institutions in a deeper sense: with self-perpetuating rules and
structures of human relationships. The uniform interfaces and practices
that arise in the world govern people's lives without necessarily being
reproduced by any conscious agency. They become woven into the fabric
of everyday life. And the design of the new information services must
of necessity be concerned with the ways in which information and its
use are embedded in this fabric and with the dynamics by which this
fabric changes and resists change, quite independently of its participants.
Information services have always been woven into the institutionally
organized activities of the people who use them, whether through paper,
radio and television broadcasts, or the telephone. The Internet, however,
is capable of weaving information services much more intricately into
people's lives, reaching -- in much more interactive and specialized
ways -- into particular settings where the services might be of use.
Although information technology has a reputation for encouraging disembodiment,
something closer to the opposite is likely to be the case. As miniaturization
and low-cost wireless data communications liberate information services
from cumbersome computer monitors and as less expensive networked printers
decentralize the manufacture of printed documents, everyday activities
can be reorganized less and less in terms of their tethering to information
resources and more and more in terms of those aspects that make more
legitimate demands on the body: travel, face-to-face conversation, interaction
with the physical machinery that one is building or repairing, aesthetic
judgments, recreational activities, cooking and eating, rest, and so
on. Information services will be called on to conform ever more creatively
to the shapes and patterns of bodily activities. For example, although
a library will continue to be a place, simply because of the bodily
demands of meeting and studying, we will increasingly speak of "librarying"
as an aspect of a wide range of activities, and library services will
be designed in such a way that they can be projected whenever, wherever,
and however they are needed.
Numerous value
issues will arise in the design of the new information services. As
communities of practice increasingly form through the mediation of computer
networks and other media, it will be increasingly necessary to decide
whether services are to be designed for individuals, in the name of
egalitarian uniform access, or for specific communities, in the name
of efficient but potentially exclusionary specialized adaptation. One
potential resolution of this tension lies in an understanding of the
institution's role in relation to everyday information use. Routinized
information use is embedded in activities and relationships, and to
be socialized into a community means, among other things, to be trained
in the discovery, evaluation, and use of a specific repertoire of information
resources. The design of information services can be divided between
supporting the settled-down steady state of these routinized uses of
information and supporting the process by which a newcomer, especially
one who is just joining a community or who lacks community support,
is able to become integrated into the community's practices. To support
an already routinized information use, an information service can reach
into a specific niche in a system of activity. The latter function,
getting someone oriented in the seemingly infinite and chaotic space
of information services, is considerably more complex. Yet it is crucial
for purposes of social mobility.
The new information
services, then, will be composed of both institutions and standards,
and they will arise through an interaction between institutions and
standards. Technologists will be constrained by the economics of information
technology, and so good design will require taking the market dynamics
of standards into account. All of the existing institutions that deliver
information services, both public and private, will be challenged to
define new roles, which will no doubt be broader in some ways and narrower
in others. But institutions that cannot negotiate the complex new terrain
may find themselves losing their legitimacy. It will be particularly
important to articulate a broad conception of access. Who will be the
advocates for broad-based accessibility of information services in a
more technologically mediated future? Designers, librarians, entrepreneurs,
regulators, educators, and social movements will all presumably have
their roles. But only if their diverse perspectives can be integrated
will we achieve the truly integrated design practice that is clearly
needed.
Endnotes
1. Harold J. Leavitt
and Thomas L. Whisler, "Management in the 1980's," Harvard Management
Review 36, no. 6 (1958): 41 - 48.
2. Thomas H. Davenport,
Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
3. Sandra Harding,
Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Friedrich A. Hayek, The
Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe,
Ill.: Free Press, 1952).
4. Philip E. Agre,
"Beyond the Mirror World: Privacy and the Representational Practices
of Computing," in Philip E. Agre and Marc Rotenberg, eds., Technology
and Privacy: The New Landscape (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
5. See, for example,
James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction
of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996).
6. See, for example,
Robert Jacobson, ed., Information Design (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1999); Kai Krause, ed., In Your Face: The Best of Interactive Interface
Design (Rockport, Mass.: Rockport, 1996); and Richard Saul Wurman,
Information Architects, ed. Peter Bradford (New York: Graphis
Press, 1996).
7. Donald A. Norman,
The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal
Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
8. Michael L. Katz
and Carl Shapiro, "Systems Competition and Network Effects," Journal
of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 2 (1994): 93 - 115.
9. See, for example,
Philip E. Agre, "The Internet and Public Discourse," First Monday
3, no. 3 (1998).
10. See, for example,
Joel Reidenberg, "Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy
Rules through Technology," Texas Law Review 96 (1998): 553 -
93.
11. Kenneth J.
Arrow, Collected Papers, vol. 4, The Economics of Information
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 142.
12. Geoffrey Bowker,
"Information Mythology: The World of/as Information," in Lisa Bud-Frierman,
ed., Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in
Modern Business (London: Routledge, 1994).
13. Paul A. David
and Mark Shurmer, "Formal Standards-Setting for Global Telecommunications
and Information Services," Telecommunications Policy 20, no.
10 (1996): 789 - 815.
